The old place was an acre or two of wooded land with a few small clapboard buildings set back from the road and shaded by a broad and high canopy of pale green maple leaves. We called it the old place because it was the first place, where our parents were born and learned to walk without shoes. On weekends in the summer we gathered there like emigrants returning to the homeland, bringing bread and apples, and hotdogs to cook on the woodstove. It was surrounded by the encroaching signs of the city on three sides: the fourth backed on to a farmer’s cornfield. At the back of the old place where the shaded woods gave way to the yellow waves and rows of corn, there was an apple tree. It was not a secret apple tree, nor did the boundary between the old place and the farmer’s field signify a shift in realm, a supernatural boundary between the world of forest and corn, adults and children. But it was significant, and important, and the branches grew up in a tangle of black bark and spurs that caught at our hair. And the leaves cooled air, which was hazy and bright. And the apples, perennially green and pleasingly sour, grew at the end of branches that drooped or stuck out into the blue of the sky, impossibly out of reach to all but unusually industrious and persistent children. Magical children. With extraordinary powers. Who spanned the slippery fallen logs and the pond, where frogs grew from green bubbles, to reach the mythical place between shade and sun. Who, like nimble stag or hare, bounded the physical break from the old house to the apple tree, our parents’ admonishments fading into the mottled shade behind us, and ran as if we were born to run. We ran as if running were water and laughing were liquid and summer the very food of life. We ran as if living were only an afternoon and the goal superfluous. And we ate with abandon. With primal pleasure. Without disgust or bother. That the scratches stung and the heat oppressed. That the day was short and blue evening approaching. That our parents were distant and the house dilapidated. That the well was dry and the city enclosing.That the ancestors were dead and deeply departed. That the taxes were unpaid and the bank foreclosing. That the future was tough like a branch in the gut as the hand slips the bark and the ground rushes to enfold the frame. And we lost our breath from the fall and the grass held us in quiet as the summer spun lazily around our heads, buzzing like flies with no particular place to go. The tree wasn’t an emblem or a portend or a representation of something anomalous. It could have been a symbol-of wildness of longing of knowing what we learn when we’re summer and the world is young-but it wasn’t. We were children at an old place learning to run.

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